Australia. Bosnia. Italy. Spain. Austria. United States. The tale of Pulitzer Prize-winning Geraldine Brooks’ newest novel travels the world piecing together clues — an insect wing, a wine stain, saltwater crystals, and a white hair — of the life and
Australia. Bosnia. Italy. Spain. Austria. United States. The tale of Pulitzer Prize-winning Geraldine Brooks’ newest novel travels the world piecing together clues — an insect wing, a wine stain, saltwater crystals, and a white hair — of the life and multiple near deaths of … a book.
It’s no ordinary book. It’s the famed “Sarajevo Haggadah,” a 600-year-old Hebrew codex. What’s more, it’s loaded with lavish illustrations that were created “at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments.” Ah, the mystery, the intrigue. The “People of the Book” (Viking. $25.95) is a combination “suspense thriller, mystery and love story” made to order for the bibliophile as well as those who simply like to read them.
When the novel opens, Australian Dr. Hanna Heath sits in “the boardroom of a bank in the middle of a city where they just stopped shooting each other five minutes ago.”
The year is 1996. The place is Bosnia. A conservator of medieval manuscripts, Hanna awaits the arrival of the Jewish text, recently safeguarded from the shelling of the Bosnia Museum by its Muslim librarian. Hanna’s task: to analyze the shape of the book, and, according to her personal philosophy of book conservation, only where absolutely necessary, repair it.
Brooks’ protagonist doesn’t believe in chemical cleanups and heavy restorations — “I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and war reflect that history.”
That history is what Brooks’ contemporary book delivers. Each of the strange items that Hanna finds in the spine of the codex during her examination serves as clues to the life and times of the people of the book: a Muslim librarian in Sarajevo who saved it from the Nazis during World War II; the Venetian censor who saved it from burning during the Inquisition; the scribe who wrote the text in 15th century Tarragona; and the surprising illustrator who against tradition illuminated the text in Seville.
The author’s narrative works best in these historical moments, as the book’s structure zigzags back and forth in time.
This presents two problems. One, the historical characters are rendered with such intrigue and are set during dramatic world events that it feels like the author is inviting them to a mystery-solving reunion at the book’s end. Of course, that could never happen with a storyline that crosses centuries, stretching from 1480 to 1996. While the reader returns to Hanna’s story time and again, the syphilitic bookbinder, the Bosnian teenage guerilla fighter and the alcoholic Catholic priest — once introduced into the story — unfortunately never reappear. Their stories end much too abruptly.
Two, Hanna is a likable enough character, but she doesn’t have much depth. There’s the strained relationship with her neurosurgeon, feminist mother, and Hanna’s perpetual inability to commit to a romantic relationship. Hanna feels like a one-dimensional stereotype.
But Brooks’ medieval bookmaking details save Hanna from a complete ho-hum existence. Hanna identifies the parchment of the Haggadah as coming from “the skin of a now-extinct breed of thick-haired Spanish mountain sheep.” At her mentor’s urging, Hanna recreates the ancient ways. “I had to make gold leaf myself,” Hanna says, “Beat it and fold it and beat it again, on something it won’t stick to, like the soft ground of scoured calf intestine.” She makes white pigment in her mother’s orchid greenhouse. “You cover lead bars with the dregs of old wine and seal them up in a shed full of animal dung.”
It’s these types of details that imbue Brooks’ first published book, since winning a Pulitzer Prize for “March,” with authenticity. That kind of attention just might come from Brooks’ journalistic tendencies.
Brooks first learned about the Sarajevo Haggadah while covering the Bosnian war as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. “While some of the facts are true to the Haggadah’s known history,” writes Brooks in the afterward, “most of the plot and all of the characters are imaginary.”
The fact that the “People of the Book” was inspired by a true story no doubt adds further appeal to the book. “Of course, a book is more than the sum of its materials,” writes the author. “It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.”
Brooks understands what so many of us wonder when we come near an ancient historic relic, usually at a museum. Whose hands have touched this? What kind of life did its maker live? If this thing could talk, what stories would it tell? In “People of the Book,” Brooks gives us some interesting answers.
